THIS WEEK: Friday, March 29th, 2013 @ 7:30 pm
(Rebroadcast Sunday @ 11 am )
THE NEXT MAYOR OF WYANDOTTE COUNTY
Joe Reardon has been the visible face of Kansas City, KS and Wyandotte County for the better part of the last decade. But now he’s calling it quits. On Tuesday, voters will be asked to decide who they want to see take his place. This week, meet the two candidates who want the job.
Mark Holland
Holland for Mayor
Ann Murguia
Murguia for Mayor
THIS WEEK: Friday, March 22nd, 2013 @ 7:30 pm
(Rebroadcast Sunday @ 11 am )
STATE OF CITY: A Mayor’s state of the city address is normally a routine affair. Not so this week in Kansas City for Mayor Sly James. The Mayor makes national news as a man bolts on stage and interrupts his annual address and then is wrestled to the ground by the Mayor’s security detail.
QUESTION #1:THE HEALTH TAX: The countdown to local Election Day begins with a look at the three issues on the citywide ballot in KCMO. Among the decisions voters will be asked to make is whether to approve a renewal of a health tax that assists the medically indigent.
QUESTION #2: CONVENTION TAX CHANGE: Voters are also being asked on April 2nd, whether to tax non-profit conventions in Kansas City. Apparently, unlike every other city in Missouri, Kansas City exempts non-profit conventions from paying the city’s convention tax, costing the city millions of dollars each year.
QUESTION #3: Shall the city be barred from funding, financing or subsidizing facilities involved in the production, assembling or refurbishing of nuclear weapons or their component parts?
EXPANDING THE SCHOOL YEAR: Did you know that Kansas has one of the longest school years in the nation? And that Missouri has one of the shortest school years in the country? That doesn’t sit well with Missouri Governor Jay Nixon who’s pushing a grand plan to extend the school year. KCPT special correspondent Sam Zeff has a closer look.
Expanding the School Year Continued
MEET THIS WEEK’S NEWS REVIEWERS:
Bill Grady
KMBZ Radio
Sam Zeff
KCPT Special Correspondent
Lynn Horsley
Kansas City Star
Dave Helling
Kansas City Star
NEXT WEEK: Wyandotte County Mayor’s Debate
Friday, March 29, 2013 @ 7:30 pm
On Sunday, March 3rd, the Kansas City Service Jam presented two services that were designed in just forty-eight hours at the Google Fiber Space in Westport. The local event launched on Friday evening at Red Nova Labs before moving over to Google Fiber for Saturday and Sunday sessions.
The event focuses on collaboration and designing services related to a shared theme, which was simply presented as “Grow ^”, or as interpreted by the participants, “Grow Up”. The Kansas City Service Jam divided into two smaller groups to design prototypes of two entirely new services.
One KC team tackled the problem of financial acumen among children. They decided to focus on parents who are fiscally responsible and have the desire to facilitate a conversation about finances with their 6-10 year old children.
“We see a lot of solutions that ‘gamify’ or abstract the use of money, our mission was to get these children involved in real world finances.” said David Rondeau, one of the group’s team members.
The group created a prototype application that allows children to utilize their parent’s device in the grocery store aisles for comparison shopping. The app, called “Eenie-Meenie”, centers around the use of cartoon monsters to guide the children by using a barcode scanner to gather information on quantity and price, enabling them to understand the financial aspects of a purchase.
The other KC team prototyped a service related to personal growth, with a particular focus on the problem of procrastination. Team member Rachel Lin said of their project, “Using a co-creative process, we developed the concept of a fun game to help a user break a negative behavior pattern (procrastination) and then guide them through the process of finishing their task.”
Near the final hours of the event, team member Justin Ruggieri said, “It’s pretty amazing that by Sunday we created a viable service which we had no awareness for on Friday.”
The Kansas City Service Jam was one of over one-hundred locations in roughly forty-eight different countries to participate in the 48-hour Global Service Jam.
2013 Local Service Jam team photo
A new report issued by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation suggests that passing legislation to offer Startup Visas has the potential to add between 500,000 and 1.6 million new jobs over the next 10 years.
The visas, included in the Startup Act 3.0 bill recently introduced in the U.S. Senate, would be available to a fixed pool of 75,000 foreign-born individuals who already hold H-1B visas or F-1 student visas and who start companies in the United States.
In the first year of business, these entrepreneurs would be required to employ at least two full-time, non-family workers and to invest or raise an investment of $100,000 or more.
By meeting the first-year requirements, recipients would be granted a three-year visa extension. If, over that three-year period, the business owner has hired, on average, one additional employee each year, he or she may apply for permanent status.
“There’s hope that 2013 finally may be the year the United States implements comprehensive immigration reform,” said Dane Stangler, director of research and policy at the Kauffman Foundation. “However, that legislation would fall short if it fails to create a new visa for the thousands of potential foreign-born entrepreneurs who are already in the country, particularly those who are likely to start technology and engineering firms. Increasing their numbers would accelerate U.S. economic and job growth and help offset the steadily declining numbers of native entrepreneurs.”
Previous research has shown that immigrant-founded technology and engineering startups employ an average of 21.37 people per firm.
A National Foundation for American Policy analysis of the top 50 venture capital¬backed companies in 2011 revealed that 24 were founded or co-founded by immigrants.
